Break ke baad - layered cookie

I took an unintentional break for a few weeks. Did not find anything interesting to write about in the middle of moving homes, Tamara's big yellow schoolbus, the job, painters, furniture moving, electrician and carpenters and tailors.

A couple of days ago Tamara, mom and Hema went on their annual vacation. This allows mom and Tamara to spend a few weeks with my sister and my nephew, Tamara gets to boss around her 'Braather' and I get sometime to myself. I get to lazy around, think, watch tv and generally live like a single man for a month. By the end of the first 48 hours, I usually get bored out of my mind, especially if its a weekend.

So between reading the entire Calvin & Hobbes collection (yes I have the hardbound copy gifted by a friend), and the option of going across to a coffee shop, today I opted to stay at home. I made a simple Rice Noodle and Sprout Pulao for dinner. All you need is some rice noodles and some simple spices and a heart to innovate. You cannot fail.

Dinner done by 8 30 pm! and I wanted something more - options are go to the nearest coffee shop, the amul icecream parlour or to the Iyengar's Bakery on Veera Desai.

I opted to stay at home and make something with whatever was available. It is baking right now as i type and I will know if it worked in around another 15 mins.

Here is what I did - The help had left some chapatti dough for tomorrow - the size of a normal adult male fist. Or dough made with half a standard tea cup of regular flour. Add to the ready dough two table spoons of ghee and four tables spoons of sugar. Knead it into a nice glossy ball and leave it in the fridge.

Take 7-9 dried figs, half a cup of almonds, an half inch of ginger, 1\2 teaspoon cardamom powder, four teaspoons of sugar, some peanuts and pulse all of this together until you get a rough mix.

Take the cold dough and divide into 3 portions, roll the 3 portaions to make 3 half plate sized sheets on a foil using enough flour so that the dough does not stick to the foil. Now layer the sheets with the fix and almond mix. Crimp the sides and brush it with egg wash and sprinkle sesame seeds on top.

Preheat over to 200 degrees cel. and bake for 30 mins till the crust turns golden brown.

I am not sure what it is going to be like, but what the heck.

The oven beeped and my cookie ( i will call it a cookie, you can call it whatever you want ) is ready

I have to wait for it to cool and the cut it into small wedges. It smells great.

It tastes, nice, kind of nutty with caramalised sugar.

Hope you enjoy making it.


(I did not use any baking powder or bicarbonate of soda, hence the crust is dense and not crumbly, you might want to use the two to get a slightly more crumbly cookie)

Bliss!

I want to be Homai Vyarawalla

She started her career in 1930s and thereafter received noticed at the national level when she moved to Mumbai in 1942 with her family, before moving to Delhi where in the next thirty years she shot many political and national leaders, including Gandhi, Nehru, Indira Gandhi and the Nehru-Gandhi family working as a press photographer. At the onset of the World War II, she started working on assignments of the Bombay based The Illustrated Weekly of India magazine which over the years till 1970, published many of her black and white images, which later became iconic. (wikipedia)

I want to be Homai Vyarawalla - I want to have seen the last 80 years standing at the threshold of monumental events. Always seeing the world through the eyes of a metal and glass apparatus, recording and preserving history as if it belonged to just her. I want to have seen the lament on the face of Mountbatten, the sorrow in the eyes of Nehru and the passage of time. Of having recorded the same streets every year and knowing how her country changed.

Its like being a rock - a lighthouse - at the mouth of a busy harbour - watching ships go by.

Its an amazing life. Wonder if someone would be interested in making a movie out of her story. Keep those pictures in a chronological order and fade into them and recreate those events on celluloid. Go deeper into her thoughts at that time. It would make wonderful viewing.


I wish i could be her.

The tethered thought bubble

Am sure most of us have grown up reading some form of comic book. It must have been a curious mix of Indrajal, DC, War, Asterix, Archies, TinTin, Chacha Chowdhary, Amar Chitra Katha and so on. Every character in these comics spoke to us readers in little bubbles with a pointy end aimed at the character. THAT is how we figured who was saying what and with what emotion. In comics like Asterix and TinTin it also helped us define our image of the personality of the characters, their voices and their behaviour. You had to read them again and again to discover things in their personalities that changed as we grew up

In real life to know a person is to interact with him or her over long hours, over conversations, over politics, interpersonal relationships and so on. One can never 'know' a person unless you have spent time with him or her and even after that we can never know how the person is in his personal space. Years can change and wax and wane the depth of knowing. New people / characters join in and out of our personal life and professional arenas.

We have now become those comic book characters! The things that we do on our social life while we are tethered to the internet through multiple devices define what we are and what our 'friends' think we are like. The thoughts communicated via the likes, comments, status messages, shares, tweets, blogs and so on hang above our heads in a virtual bubble. If one were to follow these thought bubbles of individuals, we would be able to get a fair approximation of what the individual would be like. We can judge a person's likes and dislikes, political leanings, preferences and personal life by mapping what he does via his social activities. I can visualise this as an invisible thought bubble hanging above the head with every changing updates of everything that ones does.

And worst still is that all of it is visible for all and sundry to see and analyse. And judge. So be careful what trails you leave behind everyday, someone might be keeping an excel of what you have in your thought bubble and create a character sketch based on it.

Social Networks and the art of being a sycopant

Lets define the terms mentioned in the title of this blog post first before we go ahead - Social Networks - Facebook, Linkedin, Orkut
syc·o·phant  /ˈsɪkəfənt, -ˌfænt, ˈsaɪkə-/ Show Sp[sik-uh-fuhnt, -fant, sahy-kuh-]

a self-seeking, servile flatterer; fawning parasite.

 

Social Networks are hugely successful because they satisfy a basic Human need - they allow us to advertise ourselves to our friends, co-workers and acquaintances in order to gain their attention, affection and acceptance. The social networks allow us to portray ourselves in colours that are flattering so that people who know us and people who hear of us are attracted to who we are. Its like a UGC advertising. A sort of frame work which has existed for eons where people duelled in the open with their opponents and displayed their spoils of war in the open. Why am I complaining? I too use FB for the same purpose. The constant cool quotes, the links and the comments are all designed to provide a profile that screams - He is THE man you want for the job or He is THE man for you. Somewhere in between all this attention seeking are honest messages to people who are real friends - most of these messages are hidden in the private sections where the 'audience' cannot see them and figure out the real me.

 

And then there are the sycopants, those men and women who will seek out and follow movie stars, VCs, CEOs, Writers, Social Media Experts, Angel Investors and so on. These souls hang on to every comments and every link from the people they follow. Most of their comments are loud claps on everything that is said, or encouragements that are supposed to have that sweet sound of sucking up accompanying them.

Its sad really! I am not even sure if the men and women they fawn over in the open even know about their existence or do they revel in the cacophony of people who are like groupies of rock stars and rock bands. 

Or do these sycopants use these comments to show that they are close to the people they follow? Sort of that old Delhi malice where everyone knows the chacha of the minister in power.

Growing up with my daughter

My father never imposed his will on both my sister or me. We were free to choose the school we wanted to go to - Rosary School, which was 15 Kms away from where we lived as opposed to St Ursula, Nigdi, which was just four kms away. The courses we chose while in college and the people we chose to become. I am pretty damn sure he would have been happier if I had joined Telco instead of a startup and if my sister would have studied to be a engineer.  I can only begin to imagine how he managed those thousands he required to let us imagine what we wanted, for the hundreds of books I bought and for the subscriptions and the flights of fancy he funded. For a man limited by his own need to be free, he seemed to have a sense of what was good and what was not.

I have tried to emulate him in the last 4 years and 8 months. My daughter is allowed to break things, tear up newspapers, paint the floor, play in the mud and act like an excited puppy. She has discovered books she likes and things she wants to do. Has begun to draw Dragons ( her favourite ) and choose the movies she wants to watch. She helps me fine tune the nursery rhyme she will recite at school - Her contribution to Grey Squirrel - a poem she chose when we browsed together for things that would be interesting for her. When we found a little poem Grey Squirrel interesting but just a bit too short, she helped in adding the lines by about how the grey squirrel runs up the trees so tall but never ever falls.

Sundays are the days when I pretend I can coax a little bit of baking out of a 5 year old convection microwave oven. Influenced by Nigella and Racheal Allen and an overdose of the TLC channel, I involve her in the baking. So far she has sat patiently and asked questions on why eggs need to be added and why milk and butter and sugar need to be beaten and has helped in sifting flour - plain old atta - with baking powder and cocoa powder and has stood around watching the final product rise slowly and brown and then pestered me for a slice even before the cake has cooled.

This sunday we got a little ambitious and allowed Tamara to bake her own cake. While I grated apples and ground cinnamon for a light apple cinnamon cake, she mixed the flour with a bit of oats and then with cocoa powder and then added butter and sugar and milk and whisked up a sticky gooey slop. She patiently mixed and mixed and mixed and finally decided that it needed an egg - I had to help get the egg out of the shell and into her pan. Thereafter she mixed it further to make a fine mess, which she called a mud pie. I had to convince her to allow me to use an handblender and sprinkle a few raisins into it just for some fun :).

We baked it in a tin she buttered and dusted - it had more flour than required but then she will learn as she goes along. And along came a cake that was nice - nice for a almost 5 year old.  The forty minutes were agonized over why the cake is not jumping and if the eggs would break or if there is a possibility of an omlette instead of the cake.

After 45 minutes we had a springy moist dense cake, we decided not to wait for the cake to cool ( as usual) and sliced it and smothered it with some more chocolate 'sauce' and gobbled it up

The cinnamon cake I baked in her words was ok :(

happy banana republic

It is now 62 years since the idea of India exists. Hastily patched together by browbeating princely states and dividing on the basis of language, a nation was born. Also born alongside was a Cello Tape Nation - a jugaad of gigantic proportions.  We are a nation that will stumble and fall and yet at the slightest provocation pull out our thousand year culture and wisdom of the saints and gods and mortals all combined into a bhel puri of identity.

And we are a banana republic! An additional collector is burnt alive by a mafia in a small town around 300 kms from Mumbai. One third of the country is not ruled by the Government of India but by rebels who are better armed, trained and equipped than the people who are supposed to the Law of the country. The wife of a supposed dissenting voice gets arrested by the ATS while people who bombed, maimed and killed are running training schools for future terrorists. Three metros in the country has disfunctional roads, the national capital is also the rape capital of the country, the sparkling new hub of new economy India has a reputation where women are asked to get back home before it gets dark, traffic cops never man the signal, instead hide behind parked police vans only to dance onto the roads when anyone breaks a signal by mistake. Gandhi is a thousand rupee note, a half blind politician runs a broadcast mafia down south. His crony walked away with more money than the GDP of a small African nation. We have a prime minister who is learned but cannot take decisions, a beaurocracy that demands 25 lakhs for sanction for a lift in a building. There are more exploited kids at any signal in Mumbai than there are schools, the government makes people who want to build schools jump hoops for permissions. The gap between people who have money and the ones that live a month on less than the cost of a fine dining meal is widening.  I could go on and on.

And this morning I woke up at six and wondered if I should switch on the TV to watch the annual parade - decided against it. Why bother? when all that shiny hardware cannot get rid of the people who are ruining a fine subcontinent.

measured against the cost of a cup of coffee

Six months ago my daughter started regular school. We had trawled around 20 school starting from the Ryan Global at Andheri Lokhandwala to Don Bosco at Borivli. Our idea of schools is rather old world. I studied at a family run private school called Rosary School in Pune and my wife at the St Ursula School in Nigdi. Both schools did not have airconditioning, did not have new age labs nor new education methods. When we started talking to schools in Mumbai, the first turn off was when the lady at the reception asked us if we could afford a deposit of a couple of lakhs, refundable at the end of the child's school term - and no, interest would not be paid on the deposit. The others wanted to sell a lifestyle to us, one even claimed that our girl would not have to interact with the middle class kids and would not learn their manners! We settled for Maneckji Cooper School at Juhu. And that caused a rather odd problem - it takes 90 minutes to reach the school from where we live. We decided to move and till we found a new home (we did find one eventually) closer to the school, she would use my car - her grandmother found a driver who is from the church she goes to every week.

Our driver is an odd man. He used to drive a tempo - he drives the car like he would drive a tempo even today after 6 months. He has three children - a daughter who is married and two sons who have dropped out of school. He stays in a 'kholi' - a one room dwelling close to where I live. I call my driver odd because he always has some relative who in his words - off ho gaya - the closest translation is the relative has passed away - the 'off' signifying the 'switching off ' of the relative. So far 8 of them have switched off and each time he has wanted an advance. Usually half his salary around the 15th of his month. A month ago I finally asked him how many of his relatives are left? He did not say much, when I asked him if everything was fine with him, he told me about Rs 10000 he had borrowed from some marwadi, and that he had to pay Rs 500 every month as interest. I used to pay him 6500 a month at that time - the amount he asked for. If he paid 500 to the marwadi, he would have Rs 6000 left for the month - Rs 200 a day for a family of 3. Measured against two cups of coffee at the Costa Coffee Shop a day, his family lives on as much as what I pay a month for coffee!

Its a no hope situation - two sons - both dropped out of school when the failed their exams. They do nothing - no hope because there is no way for them to complete their education. We decided to help him pay off his debt. Increased his salary so that he can repay spread over a year or so. The next question was whether I could give up half the cups of coffee a month and use that money to pay for the two kid's education. I am not sure if I want to do it. I am not sure if I want to take that commitment. What if they waste that money? And are really not interested in studying? On the other hand what if they do study and get some part-time jobs and raise their living above the desperation they are in.

It is like investing in a uncharted startup.

Any suggestions would be welcome.